John “Warm up” Mwithiga is in the pool of Kenya national athletics coaches.
He trains the best distance runners in the world and his protégés include five-time world cross country champion, twice Olympic 10,000 metres silver medalist and former world marathon record-holder Paul Tergat, and, most recently, the current world marathon record holder Eliud Kipchoge, the first man to run a sub two-hour marathon.
Always by Mwithiga’s side are fellow veteran coaches Julius Kirwa and David Letting.
Mwithiga is fondly known as “Warm up” in athletics circles, perhaps due to his rallying call to athletes to warm-up intensely whenever they launch training sessions. He has trained military generals in the field of survival.
Beneath this hard body is a man who will always be a “boy” in motorsport. His love for rallying is pure. Better, he is the man who knows about Kenya, and its hidden treasures: the bad roads.
On Wednesday, Mwithiga recollected his lost passion in life, the now rekindled Safari Rally Kenya. His best love is Rauno Aaltonen, the Finnish rally professor who was “cursed” never to win the Safari in 23 attempts. This old man is like the Almanac of auto racing, taking us back to rough Kenya, a 13-kilometre Chui Lodge section off Moi South Road, Naivasha.
Typical of his military orientation, Mwithiga – who retired as Warrant Officer One – has this simple message. “Just warm up.”
National athletics team coach John “Warm up” Mwithiga shouts instructions to his charges during a training session at Siakago in Embu on May 5, 2008.
Why? This section is short. Here, he led new military recruits in field operations, to be eaten by wild animals and stung by all sorts of buzzing creatures. Many men met their waterloo here. Many fell by the wayside.
“Chui area is bad,” recalls Mwithiga. “Buffaloes are many, and snakes hide here. My men became used to all dangers. It is survival for the fittest.” This section is not for the faint-hearted. It is a killer section, and according to Mwithiga, a graveyard of front bumpers of top cars, which I’m told by Kenya’s Surinder Thatthi, Vice President for Africa at the International Automobile Federation, cost up to Sh900,000, per bumper!
Where is the Chui Lodge section? Down Moi South Road is an entry demarcated by two wheeled tarmac stripes. Inside is home to Leopard and buffaloes. There are occasional gazelles and giraffes. The roads are narrow and clean before entering a dense forest. The trees will scrap many car paint works. A small diversion will be catastrophic.
Then there is this 45 degrees killer drift which deputy clerk of course Nazir Yakub continues referring to as “the best of the best.”
I didn’t like the place until I met a lone ranger, Kimani Macharia, armed with a machete, bows and arrows, checking out his master’s field as the wild animals took stock. He said that if the Safari cars will make it through Chui, then man was designed to fly.
Chui is also home to the Leopard. What we didn’t see was the cheetah. And, as Mwithiga recalled, “put a boy through this hell, and you will get a man.”
This section, followed by Oserian, another hell-for-rubber, 18-kilometre killer, is the sort of the world where the new WRC cars will be baptised in dust or mud, depending on the weather, said Mwithiga. BY DAILY NATION